"Between Two Worlds": UC Berkeley students for the divestment from Israel.

"Between Two Worlds": UC Berkeley students for the divestment from Israel.

Photo: Snitow-Kaufman Productions

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'Between Two Worlds': Jewish identity turf wars

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In Jewish culture, there's a long tradition of spirited debate. With no spiritual authority at the top - no pope equivalent - issues of faith and identity have always been open to interpretation.

"This goes back almost 2,000 years, when rabbis were involved in fierce intellectual arguments over Jewish identity and religious practices," says filmmaker Deborah Kaufman. "And this is why we take offense when some people in the Jewish community say, 'We're drawing a line around Jewish identity and what is the correct thing to say about Israel.' "

Kaufman, 56, and her husband, Alan Snitow, 63, are the co-directors of "Between Two Worlds," a personal-essay documentary about ideological schisms in the Jewish community. Their film, which plays Thursday and next Wednesday in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, examines a number of battlegrounds for Jewish identity - and laments the rancorous discourse that too often replaces civil dialogue.

"This film is an intervention on a lot of different arguments that are going on," Snitow said at the couple's office in the Saul Zaentz Media Center in Berkeley.

"We want to provoke," Kaufman added. "That is the purpose of this film. We certainly want to normalize a discussion about Israel being an occupying state. It shouldn't be that people are bullied into silence on that question."

"Between Two Worlds" is their fourth documentary feature. Previously, Kaufman founded the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 1981 and remained its director until 1993. Snitow was news director at KPFA-FM radio and a producer at KTVU-TV news. They met in 1981, became a couple 11 years later, and married in 2008.

Initially, Kaufman says, "We had thought the film would focus more on the evolution of Jewish American identity in terms of intermarriage and hybrid identities. We were investigating a whole other line of thought."

Instead, she found, "Everything kept dragging us back to Israel and the fights over free speech and who's entitled to speak for the Jewish community."

Big fight over film

A major catalyst was "Rachel," a documentary about American activist Rachel Corrie that ignited a firestorm when it screened at the 2009 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. A former college student from Olympia, Wash., Corrie, 23, was protesting Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip in 2003 when an Israeli bulldozer crushed her.

Critics of the occupation embraced her as a martyr, while conservative Jews saw her as a naive tool of forces eager to undermine Israel. Before "Rachel" ever screened, the festival's artistic director, Peter Stein, received hundreds of e-mails from around the world, several calling the festival "anti-Israel" and "anti-Semitic" and many demanding his resignation.

Extremists on both sides shaped the drama: In the documentary, a protester outside the Castro Theatre proudly declares she hasn't even seen the film. Inside, when Michael Harris of the conservative Jewish organization Stand With Us tries to explain his opposition to "Rachel," audience members jeer and refuse to let him speak.

"In some ways, it mirrors the Tea Party summer that was also happening in 2009," says Kaufman. "The way in which Americans speak to each other has deteriorated, and that's reflected inside the Jewish community, where there's a lot of hysteria around the future of Israel."

"Between Two Worlds" also captures a tense public hearing at UC Berkeley, where the Student Senate debates a proposal to divest from U.S. corporations that sell weapons to Israel; shows plans by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance to build a sister museum in Jerusalem on the site of a historic 800-year-old Muslim cemetery; and incorporates the filmmakers' respective family histories.

Kaufman recalls her father, Bernard, a passionate Zionist, born in Vienna, who smuggled Holocaust survivors and munitions into what was then Palestine. Later, he was devastated when one of Deborah's two sisters converted to Islam.

Communist past

Snitow's mother, Virginia, fell at the opposite end of the spectrum. She taught at an all-girls Harlem high school, marched for civil rights in Selma, Ala., visited the Soviet Union and, unbeknownst to her son until after her death, was a former Communist Party member.

"We were telling our family stories in order to tell how these two utopian visions from the past had changed over time," Kaufman said. "How they had kind of set the stage for the battles that exist between the right and left today."

Although they see "Between Two Worlds" as a plea for unity, Kaufman and Snitow found that both funding organizations and film festivals were made nervous by it. "One programmer said to us, 'Your film is really controversial,' which we think is funny," Kaufman said, "because we think of ourselves as having kind of a moderate stance. We're kind of between two worlds."

"It's not an advocacy film," Snitow said. "This is not a film with its fist in the air."